Antiman
Winner of the 2019 New Immigrant Writing Prize
Restless Books 2021
Winner of the 2022 Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Adult Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2022 The Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award.
Short listed for the 2022 guyana prize for literature
Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family’s abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji’s eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place?
Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji’s music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father’s disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. But even in the South Asian paradise of Jackson Heights, Rajiv feels like an outsider: “Coolie” rather than Desi. And then the final hammer of estrangement falls when his cousin outs him as an “antiman”—a Caribbean slur for men who love men—and his father and aunts disown him.
But Aji has taught Rajiv resilience. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman—forging a new way of being entirely his own. Rapturous, inventive, and devastating in its critique of our own failures of inclusion, Antiman is a hybrid memoir that helps us see ourselves and relationships anew, and announces an exciting new talent in Rajiv Mohabir.
Praise for Antiman
“Antiman makes its own way in American letters. Transfused with what Mohabir calls in his Author’s Note, ‘the queerest magic’ of his Aji’s songs, it’s an incomparable, hybrid account of self and family that defies expectations. Singular, fierce: That’s the gorgeous sound of a bird taking flight.”
—Anita Felicelli, The Washington Post
“In his gorgeous and experimental memoir, Antiman, Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir… delves into his family's history and its tangle of stigmas to locate a powerful literary heritage and the origins of his own artistic life…. Interspersing experiments in multilingual poetry among sections of conventional memoir, Antiman serves as both a touching account of the author's life and a bold statement of his poetics.”
—Theo Henderson, Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
“Rajiv Mohabir achieves a gorgeous, passionately lyrical ‘hybrid’ of a memoir-mosaic, sojourning through straightforward narrative, multifold geographies and legacies, and evocative (and provocative) vulnerable reflections, all infused with a deeply yearning poetical heartbeat. Antiman lives, breathes, and dances in unbridled joy.”
—Thomas Glave, author of The Torturer’s Wife
“Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is a powerful portrait of the artist as a young, brown, immigrant, queer man and is my favorite kind of book, prose written by a poet…. This book stops time to celebrate voices worth remembering.”
—Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers
“The pieces of Mohabir’s queerness that he layers together come to speak a transgressive language all of their own. In doing so, he simultaneously defies mainstream tropes and representations of queer masculinity in the Global North by rejecting normative identity terms such as “gay”, or “out of the closet”. Instead, he opts to use a term more-often-than-not positioned within the realm of the pejorative, oppressive, and violent in Guyana and the Guyanese diaspora: the Antiman…. Antiman offers a syllabus in critical queer Indo-Caribbean practice and pedagogy. In it, we find foundational truths about the contemporary intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and diaspora within the queer Indo-Caribbean, importantly turning us to its historical past and our negotiations with its contemporary afterlife.”
—Ryan Persadie and Natasha Ramoutar, Stabroek News
“In this searing, unflinching investigation of diaspora, heritage, and personal evolution, Rajiv Mohabir has fashioned a blues that blurs the boundaries of genre, a book-song that haunts and resonates. Antiman is a potent, lyrical fusion of harmony, dissonance, and recognizance. Music lives on every page.”
—Jabari Asim, author of We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival
“Anyone who has struggled to belong, forced to put different pieces together to create an imperfect home in which to take refuge, will learn from Mohabir’s enthralling vulnerability in Antiman.”
—Babi Oloko, Los Angeles Review of Books
“With a poet’s rhythms and thrilling attunement to how to bend and play with language, Mohabir tells a rich and layered story of sexuality, family, culture, and what it is to come into your own.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
“Mohabir carves a vessel to contain his multitudes using the instruments of prose, song, poetry, and prayer. Authentic and defiant, this memoir responds to erasure with assertion, to derogation with reclamation, and to fragmentation with relation. Fans of Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, and Saeed Jones will adore this book!”
—Serena, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)
“A confluence of poetry, narrative, song, and history, Antiman is a dazzling show of literary prowess. Through the memoir, Mohabir not only strives to reclaim his intersecting identities in the face of erasure and violence—he seeks to reunite with his grandmother and extended community across time and space. In doing so, he breaks and reinvents the mold of memoir. A compelling and moving masterpiece.”
—Anna, White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)
“Mohabir's act of translating his Aji's songs, their English versions rooted right next to their purest form, is a way of ensuring that his identity remains whole, not broken—an amalgamation of his ancestors' many truths.”
—Jeevika Verma, NPR
“Interwoven with Bhojpuri and Creole renderings of Aji’s songs and stories as well as Mohabir’s own interesting poetry, this distinctive memoir explores the complex, at times heartbreaking, intersection of identities and the tumultuous process of becoming an artist. A shattering and heartfelt journey from heartache and hesitancy to confidence, self-acceptance, and joy.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Uncovering hidden histories and languages buried in the rubble of colonialism is just one of the many wonders of Antiman... which, like its author, is a beautifully hybrid creation that defies convention and categorization…. Like the best memoirs, Mohabir’s tells us as much about ourselves as it does about him, inviting us to turn the mirror inward and find resonances of our own lives with his…. Working in concert with its narrative, the construction of the book itself is a joy—an interweaving of languages, forms, and myths.”
—Shankar Narayan, Raven Chronicles Press
“Not quite a coming out story, Antiman is an illuminating ‘hybrid memoir,’ a record of Mohabir’s coming to terms with himself, discovering who he is, and his embrace of multiple communities and cultures.”
—Reginald Harris, The Gay and Lesbian Review
“A nuanced account that’s sensitively told, the memoir Antiman uses duality on multiple levels to shape its central questions and shift the ways that a story about Indian immigrant identity, history, and legacy is heard and understood.”
—Letitia Montgomery-Rogers, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
“All of Mohabir’s virtuosities are on display in Antiman.”
—Kiran Bhat, Moko Magazine
“[Mohabir] weaves the stories of his parents and grandparents into his own, exploring not only his life as a queer brown person in the U.S., but his place in a much bigger story about exile and displacement, home and belonging.”
—Laura Sackton, Book Riot
“In Antiman, Rajiv Mohabir sets forth on a journey with few parallels in the history of immigrant literature. While tracing his ancestors’ peripatetic migrations from rural India to Guyana to Canada and the US, Mohabir examines both the bonds and disconnects between his American identity as a gay poet with the expectations and limitations of his diverse cultural inheritance…. More than a memoir, this brave and beautiful book is a tale of the resilience of the human heart, and of multiple family journeys across generations and four continents. With great intelligence and insight, Mohabir tackles questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, spinning tales of tenderness and ignorance, of love and of longing for that mysterious place called home.”
—Terry Hong, Héctor Tobar, and Ilan Stavans, from the Prize Judges’ Citation